The lockout is over!!!!!! The lockout is over!!!!!!! The lockout is over!!!!!! Americans , Canadians, Swedes, Fins, Germans, French, Slovakians, Russians unite!! God bless us all!!!! The lockout is over!!!!!!

What does that mean? :P

Sorry. I got carried away. ;p

I just knew I should have kept this to myself. Oy.

National Health Lottery?

I never understood why beating somebody up in a bar is a crime but doing it on skates is a sport ...

As long as it's only two people fighting each other and there is no severe bodily harm, it's not a crime in Poland unless one of the participants goes to cops :PNo, I asked seriously, what the hell is lockout in NHL? :P

Pro Hockey. I aways thought because the game is decidedly un-American in it's player makeup that an inernational contigent such as this forum would notice but at this point I kind of feel like a troll. I'll back off for a while. :)

You still didn't answer what lockout is, and I had to Google it :-( It's interesting, I didn't even know there were such big troubles in NHL...

I have nothing against hockey, it's clearly a better sport than NFL :P

from what I've heard the NHL (national hockey league) season didn't start as the players (and their union) wanted something, probably more money, and the clubs didn't want to pay up, so the players were on strike and NHL was just closed... and now it's open again.

if I'm completely wrong, just please ignore this :) I didn't search for that and I don't watch NHL...

My first thought as well!
- that or that the spammers were back.
Thankfully wrong

Yeah, I googled it and found something similar. At first I thought term "lockout" reffers to some NHL related slang word, but no, it was an actual lockout.

Interesting.

Hockey is the only sport that I really enjoy all of the time. I can watch any teams during the playoffs or regular season and I love it. Baseball I only really find enjoyable during the playoffs and if I'm watching my home team. American football I find to be painfully boring. There's a statistic somewhere that supposedly in an entire 3.5 hour game, there's only around 12 or so minutes on average of actual gameplay in football. Booooring. A friend of mine who likes football actually recorded a game when I told him that and he said it ended up being like 13 minutes, so that statistic might be pretty accurate. I'm not a huge fan of soccer, probably because I played it for so long in my youth and got sick of it, but it doesn't have a big presence in America anyways.

I don't know exactly why I like hockey so much more than other sports, but I'd guess because it's fast paced, the hard hits, and the fighting is awesome. Things in this day and age are sissified enough as it is, so I think it's refreshing to see men being able to act like men from time to time.

Wish they would have been able to come to an agreement sooner!

The really good teams don't fight. Only four teams in history have led the league in penalty minutes AND won the Stanly Cup. The 77 Flyers were one of those teams but they didn't so much fight as they came out, disembowled the opposing team, and forced them to forfeit.

YEAH now I can see my Avs dominating the rest of the season :P

Just because a team doesn't lead the league in penalty minutes doesn't mean that no players on that team weren't involved in any fights that season. Every team has players that fight occasionally, and I enjoy it. I'm not talking about games that turn into all out brawls or anything like that, but I enjoy the fact that in hockey, sometimes things get a little heated and they're allowed to settle it through a contained fight without being heavily penalized for it (with exceptions of course).